The High Cost of Free Parking

IN THIS BOOK, an UCLA professor in the Department of Urban Planning dissects the economic, social and environmental impacts of current US parking regulations, criticizes current planning practice in relation to parking, and proposes reforms. The study demonstrates that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl and extravagant energy use in the US. It explains how planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion, but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy and degrading the environment. The other purpose of the book is thus to suggest how planners can frame an argument – economic, social, environmental and aesthetic – to initiate new approaches to plan for parking in a more sensible, effective and fair manner. The first two parts of the book analyze the parking problem, and the last part proposes solutions.

Part I examines current approaches to planning for parking in the US. The first chapters explain how planners set minimum parking requirements for every land use, based on studies that are poorly conceived and limited or reproducing faulty standards and policies from one city to the next. They highlight the problems with the tools and strategies used in the planning for parking process, and convey the logic behind the set parking requirements. In Chapter 5, the author demonstrates through a series of case studies how these policies have engendered a great planning disaster, for instance by encouraging people’s decision to drive, distorting urban forms and designs, causing higher housing costs, damaging the urban economy, and price discrimination. Chapter 6 compiles and assesses the different costs related to current parking policies, which can be quantitative, such as increased housing prices, unjust subsidies for cars, distorted transportation choices, sprawl, social inequity, and economic and environmental degradation; or qualitative, such as the degradation of landscapes. The cost of free parking is put in perspective in Chapter 7, to reveal its worthless – if not damaging – absurdity, exemplified, in Chapter 8, by the allegory of the minimum telephone requirements. Chapter 9 then makes a comparison between the costs of public and private parking, while Chapter 10 suggests that solving the parking problem is more about reducing demand than increasing supply, for environmental, economic and social reasons.

Part II shows that cities inadvertently create the economic incentive to cruise for kerb parking when they charge too low a price for it. Through examples from different cities in the US, Chapter 11 demonstrates that cruising for parking increases vehicle travel without adding either vehicles or real travel, and results mainly in congestion, squandered fuel and polluted air. Chapter 12 questions what price should be charged for kerb parking, and whether kerb parking can be considered a public good. Chapter 13 takes a more economic approach to show that underpriced kerb parking creates the incentive to cruise. The argument is illustrated in Chapter 14 with a study of cruising for parking in Westwood Village, California.

Part III offers new solutions to the parking problem. It explains how a well-functioning market with prices that vary with time of day and day of the week can balance a variable demand for kerb parking with the fixed supply of kerb spaces. If cities change market prices for kerb parking, drivers will usually be able to find an available space near their destination. The author argues, using economic analysis and concrete cases, that market- priced kerb parking will save time, reduce congestion, conserve energy, improve air quality and produce public revenue. He suggests that cities can persuade residents to support charging market prices for their kerb parking spaces by returning all meter revenue to the neighbourhoods that generate it. In this context, zoning requirements for off-street parking will no longer be requir